Windows Into Hell

by James Wymore

  Edward watched her step away from the counter and took advantage of a slight break in the flow of customers. He went to the barista, just out of sight of the register. Mitchell stepped to the side where the Airpots held vigil, grabbing a Nifty Nickel to “read” as he leaned against the counter to listen in.

  “Look, you need to pick up your game here, missy. I understand you had some tragedy recently, and that’s why I’m here, but you’ve got to shake this off.”

  “Yes, Mr. Roosevelt.”

  “You can’t let this define you. Now, if you don’t get with the program, you’re out on your ass. Got it?”

  She swallowed and nodded. “Yes, Mr. Roosevelt.”

  “Now clean yourself up. No one wants to look at a sad chick.”

  He swatted her butt and walked away, unaware of the flinch she hid when he did so. She wiped her cheeks and blinked, looking up to the ceiling as she got herself under control. She walked forward, and Mitchell looked over the little glass wall separating them.

  “Cup lids.”

  She started, and looked at Mitchell, who smiled. She relaxed. “What?”

  “Cup lids. You came back here for cup lids. You’re almost out up front.”

  She nodded, snapping her fingers. “Right.” She turned and got out a sleeve of lids. “Thank you. And thank you for your help last night.”

  “Anytime. You still have my card?”

  She nodded.

  “Mitchell,” called the other barista.

  They looked at the front counter and she smiled. “That’s you.”

  “That’s me. You take care.”

  She nodded and waved as he left with his latte.

  When he got to the office, he passed the lady at the front desk and smiled, then saluted Dispatch with his coffee. Alan was on the phone and lifted the files from the night before. Mitchell nodded and grabbed them on the way by. He got into his office and was again greeted by the billboards. He looked at the little couch, the blanket folded on it and the pillow on top. He set down his coffee and pulled out his phone.

  “BSU Security Front Desk.”

  “Hi, it’s Mitchell. Can you come back here when you get a second? Bring the gal from Dispatch when she gets a free moment.”

  “Both of us?”

  “Please.”

  “All right…” the dispatch officer drawled, uncertain.

  Mitchell was halfway through the last report when the two women came in the door.

  “Ah, I am trying to decide if I need to get glasses. Can you ladies read off all the billboards you see from this window?”

  The women looked at each other, then scanned the view.

  Dispatch nodded to the left. “Get in the game.”

  Front Desk nodded. “That’s all I see.”

  “What about the names of those businesses over there?” He pointed to the area behind the billboard that said Welcome to Hell.

  “Walgreens. Chipotle. The Dutch Goose.”

  Dispatch nodded. “And I know that’s the Pie Hole over there, but I can’t read it from here.”

  Mitchell looked. The billboards blocked nearly every one of those signs for him. “How long have you been in Boise?”

  “All my life.”

  “Born and raised.”

  He took a deep breath. “Well, I guess you know a good optometrist then. I do in fact need glasses.” He turned back to them. “Thank you, ladies.”

  They nodded and left.

  Alan came in with another file. “This just got finished.”

  “Rape or suicide?”

  “Rape. Library.”

  Mitchell closed his eyes.

  Mitchell reached for the pot of coffee, then set it back down. He put his dirty cup by the extra one and picked up the business card there. He pulled out his phone and dialed.

  “Hey, Carl. Mitchell Freeman here, from BSU Security.”

  “Oh hey! How are you, my friend?”

  “Good, good.” Mitchell frowned, then leaned against the desk. “Actually, that’s a lie. I believe I’m setting up residence in ‘Not Okay’ these days.” He cleared his throat. Carl didn’t interrupt him. “Carl, you… I got the feeling, looking through your Facebook and everything, that you’ve been here a while. All the stuff you have photos of show you not aging. You changed your hairstyle three times and, well, guys simply don’t do that. I’ve had the same haircut since I left the police academy. Only something, I don’t know…”

  “What’s your question, Mitchell?”

  Mitchell swallowed. “Have you ever tried to get out of here?”

  Long pause. “Yeah. For the first, I don’t know how long, I tried to get out of here. I was a Coroner, back in the 70s. One of the groundbreakers. But when I got here, every day, I saw women with half their heads gone. Every day, a dozen. I lived in Salt Lake City then. I can’t even imagine what it would have been like in Los Angeles or New York. Part of why I chose Pocatello was because the population was so small, I might be able to cut my chances of seeing a girl in pieces down to single digits.”

  “What about the rules? What about the explanation?”

  “I tried. I looked everywhere. I even partnered up with guys. We never got close. All we got was more women. Dead women. Ya get numb to it after a while. Then, after about twenty years, I decided I had had enough of hosing brains off my tables. So, I quit. I decided to go back to school and try something else. Dentistry. I didn’t see brains, but I was pretty damned sure my fellow dentists were doing something shady behind their closed doors. No nurses in there, which wasn’t odd at the time. But then I realized I never had the same patients more than twice, if they were women. Nurses and assistants streamed through like fast food customers. Finally, I left that too.”

  “For coaching?”

  Carl probably nodded, based upon his voice when he spoke. “Yeah. I figured I’d walk carefully, not go in any rooms without knocking and waiting. I decided that, once these deaths and rapes were past five figures and running at six, I was done trying to figure out what Hell wanted. Whatever ‘Heaven’ promised, there was no way it would wash away what I experienced here.”

  There has to be a way. It says so in the rules. “How much do you trust the rules?”

  Carl sighed. “Every rule seems to be provable except the one about getting out.”

  Mitchell hesitated. “Even the one about dying?”

  Carl didn’t answer, but he didn’t need to.

  It was after dark when he left the office. He’d managed to talk to every person in his department on every shift. Every man saw the rules, every woman couldn’t. Granted, there were only three women total working there, but he had walked the campus and asked about one-third of the folks he met. He was using a clipboard and marking down the answers to make it look like a marketing survey. He even dared to ask couples who were walking together what they saw, even though he suspected he would cause arguments and possible domestic violence over the questions.

  He went to his house by way of the Pie Hole this time and was surprised to get a call from the barista as he opened his door.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I wanted to thank you for helping me last night. And today. You probably saved my job.”

  “Well, anything I can do to help. You okay now?”

  She was silent, then, “I just wanted to say thank you.”

  A stab of fear struck just below the ribs. Something in her voice… He forced himself to smile so it would show in his tone. “I have pizza.”

  A moment, then “Excuse me?”

  “I”—he gestured to the two slices of pizza, as if she could see him—“I have pizza, from the Pie Hole. Would you like to come over and have some?”

  “Pizza.”

  “There’s far too much for me. Seriously.” He grabbed his keys. “I can come get you, you can help me out with this problem, and then I’ll take you back home. What’s your address?”

  She gave him an apartment house near campus and he was out th
e door before she could change her mind.

  “This is more than you can handle?” She looked at the two slices of cold pizza on the coffee table.

  “I’m used to salads and red wine.”

  She smiled, which made him feel better. “Yeah, I’ve always gotten that vibe from you.”

  “I can microwave it.” He picked up the small box.

  “Thanks.” She looked around. “So, clearly, you don’t have a dog.”

  He walked into the kitchen. “How could you tell?”

  “You left pizza unattended for an hour.”

  He nodded. Good observation. Could he even have a dog? “Do you have a dog?”

  “No. Our apartment doesn’t allow them. Noise ordinance.”

  “Maybe if you had a dog, you could have taken it jogging.”

  He regretted the words as soon as he said them.

  Silence came from the other room, then he heard the front door open. He came out of the kitchen and went to the open door. She was at the bottom of the front stairs, looking around.

  “I’m sorry. That was a dick thing to say.”

  “It wasn’t my fault.”

  He rolled his eyes in embarrassment. “No, of course not. I didn’t mean…”

  “I know what you meant.” She turned and she was holding a gun pointed under her chin.

  “Oh God.” He put his hands up. “Don’t…”

  “Why not?” She blinked and tears ran down her face.

  “You have so much to live for.” He took a step toward her.

  “Do I? I have a lifetime of groping and cowering, of being blamed and lied to. I’m ‘damaged goods,’ according to my boss, and should make sure I hide this so that I can still get a husband.”

  Mitchell looked at the gun and gauged if he could grab it from her or if he should knock her out to end the encounter. She already had a head injury. She’d probably drop pretty fast and if he hit her, so if it knocked her head away from the gun barrel, it wouldn’t kill her, even if it discharged. Ordinarily, he would never think about hitting a woman, but he was doing it to save her life. He looked at her eyes and saw her looking at his right hand. He started to follow her gaze when she spoke.

  “I don’t want to be afraid anymore.”

  Mitchell looked up just as peace settled into her eyes. Then the sound and shot left the barrel and went through her head. The bullet made a black mark on the flesh under her jaw and he felt the tremor as the lead exploded through her brain, emptying her skull through a sudden, unfashionable hole. She fell back toward the cement and a fine red mist coated his teeth and face, iron and copper painting his tongue. He watched her fall, his confused brain noting that her head still had the stitches from her previous injury.

  It all came back to real time with a splat. He stood there, the barista dead on his walkway of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, blood and brains hitting the concrete several feet behind her. He had a small willow tree in the front yard that looked like it tried to catch her but missed. One of the thin branches dripped onto the grass beside her. Doors opened around the neighborhood and men came out to see what happened. One or two women were amongst them, but never more than two standing near each other. Walter was on his cell phone, but Mitchell couldn’t understand his words.

  When the sirens arrived, they managed to get him to look up. Apparently, at some point he sat down. His hands had tiny spots on them. His palm on his left hand matched the back of his hand and his knuckles on the right. He realized that he had made a fist to punch her right before she shot herself.

  She must have thought I was just like the others.

  His eyes wandered up to the sky where several bright bars of light shone off billboards that were just out of sight.

  Every day, he looked at those billboards and they were exactly the same, but they meant something different. Every day, he would remember that he was in Hell. He tried to help a woman and she ended up fearing him as much as her assailants. He would look at files with rapes and suicides and see that the two often coincided. He eventually left his job and that house and just drove, but he discovered it wasn’t any different anywhere else. He determined that the women here weren’t real and that it didn’t matter what he or anyone did to them.

  After all, it wasn’t their Hell.

  verything seemed so real. Colors sprang at my eyes, so vivid and bright. I had to laugh.

  “This is almost embarrassing,” I said to no one. “You would think I would dream up something less cliché.”

  I glanced over at the two women sitting next to me on rickety metal chairs. Like me, they sported baggy white robes. They both were attractive. The lady furthest from me wrung her hands together as she repeatedly muttered a prayer. Her long black hair waved rhythmically as she rocked forward and back, staring intently at the floor.

  The other woman glared at me, loathing and terror on her face. “How can you sit there smiling?” She shoved light brown hair aside from her bulging eyes. “Don’t you see what’s going on here?” Her lip quivered as she turned to stare out the large windows. “I wasn’t a bad person. Lots of people did worse things than I did. I shouldn’t be here. Someone is making a mistake.” She melted into tears.

  I looked away. I refused to waste my time responding to figments of my imagination. I wished I had dreamed up a more impressive office space; standard beige carpet, mahogany desk, well-placed plants, and glaring rectangular ceiling lights. Extremely boring.

  “I need to read more fiction,” I told myself. “My creative skills leave something to be desired. At least the view outside looks cool.”

  I jumped up and strolled to the window. This building resided within a vast cavern, lit only by the flickering red glow of the bubbling lava flowing past us. Various geysers of molten rock spurted from the molten sea and then dripped from stalactites above.

  People dressed like demons entered the cavern from fissures in the far wall. I hardly need describe them, they fit the devil stereotype so well. Their blood-red torsos rippled with muscle. They walked on shaggy legs with cloven feet. They each donned their own unique set of curved horns, some rolling back like the racks of ibexes or rams, others spiraling upward like African antelope. Glowing, yellow eyes accented the ferocious teeth on their large bearded heads.

  The demons dragged heavy chains, by which they yanked dozens of terrified souls from cavities in the walls. Clothing torn and dirty, the half-conscious prisoners stumbled into the incinerating soup. Rather than bursting into flame, their bodies showed no signs of harm. Judging by their moaning and writhing in agony, it obviously didn’t feel so good. Those who tried to escape contended with the whips of their merciless demon overlords.

  I shook my head, grinning as I made my way back to my seat. The brown-haired woman still sobbed, her face buried in her hands. I wanted to empathize with her, but I stopped myself. I had to keep remembering that this was just a delusion. There were no women, no demons, no lava, and no tormented souls. My damaged brain had simply fallen into a surprisingly vivid dream.

  Memories of the events leading up to this mental anomaly remained clear. A week ago, I drove home after a wild party at my uncle’s house. I was such an idiot. I drank too much. I totally caused the accident. During one of my brief moments of consciousness, a nurse told me the other guy survived. I slammed my BMW into a van; the driver was Mormon… I heard they don’t even drink alcohol. I couldn’t tell how long I’d been in the hospital. I knew my prospects weren’t good.

  My brain activity eventually slowed down. I began experiencing a mental phenomenon known as an NDE—a Near-Death Experience. I already passed through most of the stages. I saw the white light. I entered the tunnel. I’d never felt such peace. Memories of my life flooded my mind. I remembered every iota of my life. I admit it. It amazed me.

  I waited anxiously for the next stage, where the God-like figure showed up and talked to the NDE participant. I looked forward to it. I figured I’d learn a lot about myself, having a conversation with the
God my mind invented. After that, I expected I would wake up. At least, I hoped I would. If not, my brain would just shut down and fade to eternal blackness.

  To be honest, I really liked it here. I didn’t want to go back. If I did go back, I determined to find a way to prove to the world that NDE’s were not actual visits to heaven. For years, I believed they were a hoax—lame attempts by Christians to try to fool people into believing in their religion. I had obsessed about it. I read a lot about them. Near Death Experiences could be explained entirely by science. Of course, experiencing it now for myself, I could see why so many people believed they really died. Every one of my senses screamed in my brain: You are dead. This is the afterlife. Open your eyes ! Truthfully, if not for the silly lava lake and the over-the-top horned demons, I might have believed it.

  My patience waned. I wanted to explore this mental landscape. Just as I began my search for an exit, one of the horned demons entered from a side door and took a seat behind the desk. He looked similar to the other demons, but not quite as impressive. His horns were short and green, shaped like the rack of a young bighorn sheep. He had less hair than the other demons and his head did not reach the top of the high-backed red leather chair in which he sat. He placed a cup of steaming coffee on his desk as he studied each of us in turn. I wondered what words my brain would put in this little devil’s mouth.

  The praying lady peeked up at him with one eye for about a second and then closed both eyes tight before praying even more vigorously. The women next to me frowned so intensely I thought her lips might drip off the sides of her chin. Her eyes were swollen. I hypothesized that these women represented repressed aspects of my subconscious mind. I would have to analyze them better some other time.

  “Looks like we have another smiler,” the beast said in a high-pitched, guttural growl, addressing me.

  Although I did not appreciate the condescension, I could not argue. I had been smiling the whole time.

  He laughed at me. “I love it. You’re sitting in a room, in the afterlife, with two other recently deceased souls and the demon that carries your future at the tip of his claws—and you still cannot force yourself to believe.” He laughed as if he’d told a joke. “And you probably think you’re the more intelligent one in the room.” He laughed again, and then suddenly grew serious. “I’ll wager your smiling face will last about three hours, tops. Perhaps only two. Yes, I’m going to place my bet on two hours.”